Welcome to Souvenirland

The pope’s socks, mosaic boxes, and other mementos of a Roman holiday. Plus welcome to my Substack!

 “I’m going to quit my job and open a shop called Souvenirland,” joked my father Hal, rolling his eyes as my fashionable mother, Carol, younger sister Sally, and I beelined for the gift shop at the Vatican Museums in Rome. “Souvenirland will sell mementos from all around the world, and it’ll just be at your local mall. No more boring, expensive vacations to national parks or European churches!”

It was the mid 1980s, and, for the umpteenth family vacation, the women in my father’s life were demonstrating as much enthusiasm for a historic destination’s retail as its museums, as much passion for mindless window-shopping as for eating the local pasta carbonara. We hadn’t even visited the Sistine Chapel or the Vatican, and teenage me was already pawing through the gift shop postcards as my mother tried on a scarf.

My father hated gift shops. He wanted to gorge on Roman statues, old churches, and porchetta sandwiches; Sally and I were content to idle in toy stores selling wooden puppets or watch my mother try on smooth, elbow-length gloves at the sweet-smelling leather stores near the Spanish Steps.

As we traipsed down the Vatican’s endless hallways, my father was gleeful. We passed hordes of marble statues and innumerable paintings of Jesus and Mary. (“The Pope needs a golden skateboard to get around here faster,” said my mother.)  But even my sullen tween sister gasped at the Sistine Chapel, though was she impressed with Michelangelo’s jumbo God and Adam or the handsome, slim-suited guards repeating “Silencio” to the noisy tourists?

A Roman guard, me, and Sally outside the Vatican, circa the late 1980s.

The stores and crafts sellers in the streets outside the Vatican were equally entrancing. A bit of cash could net you a plastic figure of a gladiator, a shrunken version of Michelangelo’s “David” trapped in a snow globe, or a cheap calendar showcasing a different luridly colored saint each month. (“Young lady, you are not Catholic, you’re Unitarian,” said my mother, snatching the calendar from my hands.)

I bought a tiny metal pillbox from an older woman, her hair tied back in a bright silk scarf. She had spread a folding table with mosaic-embellished trinkets: brooches, pencil cups, earrings. The box, barely larger than the agnolotti my family later snarfed in a trattoria, had a lid encrusted with bits of blue, pink and white marble. It looked like floors we’d just seen in the Vatican.

At Gammarelli, a tailor to the clergy since 1798, we ogled papal robes and bishop’s cassocks. Laypeople can’t purchase those, but the same oddly flashy knee-high red socks that Catholic cardinals wear are still a popular souvenir. They even seduced my father, who bought a pair. The next day, when he slipped them on with loafers and a pair of white linen pants (bought at a Roman department store), he seemed more confident and sophisticated, transformed by travel. Another possible Souvenirland client.

Gammarelli socks, made for the clergy, stylish enough for my Dad.

Spoiler alert: Hal didn’t leave his teaching gig to found a knickknack megastore. But his joke—or was it a divine intervention?—endured. Now, as a travel writer and memento hunter, I’m fulfilling his Souvenirland prophecy. Sort of.

From the blue glass evil eyes of Turkey to the breezy pastel dresses of Stockholm clothing designers, the material goods of different cultures and communities often drive my travel. On both personal and work trips—first as a fashion editor at the Washington Post, later as a longtime travel editor at National Geographic—I always build in a few hours for treasure hunting.

Sometimes I’m seeking homegrown crafts and the people who make them–shaggy Moroccan tribal rugs woven by women in the Atlas Mountains, black clay pottery shaped by artisans in Oaxaca, Mexico. Other times, I’m just looking, eyeballing what the spice sellers are touting in Marrakech’s souks or which shoes the cool girls in Copenhagen are wearing this summer.

Through all my wandering and browsing, I’m trying less to amass a house full of tchotchkes (or a closet full of caftans) than I am to understand new places better, to walk on their carpets, try on their soccer jerseys, and drink out of their handmade cups. I’ve watched nomads make camel felt rugs in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, hunted for vintage dresses in the Paris flea market, and learned to weave silk beside the Mekong River in Laos.

When I do buy a souvenir, it’s usually an attempt to bring back a totem of how I felt and what I did somewhere far from home. I can’t keep time in a bottle, but I can preserve a great trip with a silver bracelet from Santa Fe or a basket from Botswana.

A mosaic box, purchased in 1980s Rome.

Today, the little Italian box sits on my dressing table, snuggled amid the perfume bottles and sunblock. It holds a few lira coins from those pre-Euro days. I crack it open, touch the old money, and flash back to that Italian summer. I’m in a polka dotted sundress and a frizzy perm, pretending to be Sophia Loren. And just ahead of me on a sun-flashed piazza, there’s my late father, flashing his red socks.

I hope you’ll read this newsletter and come along for the ride. The Souvenirist will brim with my recommendations and discoveries about where to shop and what to buy out in the wide, wide world. Along the way, I’ll dive into the history of local crafts, reveal the most stylish hotels in shopping meccas, and scout interesting homegrown brands and independent shops.